DreamHaven wins Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s 2024 Congressional App Challenge in Texas’ 34th District

When asked what inspired the creation of DreamHaven, the student said, “The main inspiration for this app was a daily frustration within me. I would often go to sleep at night having sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible dreams, waking up only to just forget them. These dreams I felt provided me with insight into what was bothering me, what I was passionate about, and what was going on in the back of my mind. However, forgetting the dreams just led my insight to turn into not knowing once again. The idea of having an app that could not only act as a simple journal for these dreams but simultaneously take the role of interpreting them for me seemed very useful.

Furthermore, the idea of dreams themselves always fascinated me. So little is known about how we sleep, what goes in our minds during our sleep, how these dreams come about, and why specific dreams take place. While DreamHaven is not proposed as a ‘scientific research tool,’ the information and insights gained from it could potentially lead to a greater understanding of the field if it were to be used by many people. Understanding even a little more about sleep can make huge differences in people’s lives. I also found that when I go to sleep very late and wake up very early, I tend to have an unpleasant sleeping experience, as my mind tends to be more mentally occupied and not fully at rest. This allowed me to adjust my sleep schedule whenever possible to prevent cases where I woke up off to a bad start of the day. I feel that an app like DreamHaven could provide the same value to others.

Finally, I also was seeking the challenge of building a full-stack application using server-side rendering technology with NextJS and also experimenting with a large-language-model API such as the Gemini API. I have always felt that learning through building has always been the optimal way for me to learn coding, and through this experience, I definitely learned a great deal about the work-flow in NextJS, especially with authentication, and how to interact with the Gemini API.”